I get a team. I hope you Blady Gray. Welcome to another installing the show. We were just banging on Tiff and David and I. We're talking about we'll get to the topic at hand, but we're talking about Tiss fledgling piano career. Which how is it going? Before we talk to the man?
It's going great, it's going great. It's very hard. There's a lot to learn.
How many days are you into your piano career? Now?
It was two weeks on Sunday since I brought her home.
Oh yeah, she.
Has a gender your keyboard. That's good, and so two weeks Sunday, So it's like seventeen days now. Yeah, what's it? Because the excitement level was fifteen about two weeks ago.
Do you know what's good? What's good is the way it feels that I link it with this. I guess the science of learning boxing is. I'm obsessed with doing on the ship that most people complain about. I'll sit and do scal I'm like, what should I practice to be good? And I'll just do him and do him and do him and do him because I know what doing it and doing it and doing it results in. When you're just trying to learn to throw one punch, and I've got eighty eight bloody keys to memorize.
I was going to.
Ask, as stupidly when the public might get to see you, But the public's been seeing you from about day two, you shy little wallflower.
Day one.
Five minutes in I played a little tune and put it up five minutes.
Do you reckon? Let's before we ask alesbo do you reckon his kick and play an instrument? What's your yes? Or no? I bet he can? I bet he played something when he was a kid. Probably pick I reckon?
He played a wind instrument?
Really?
Yeah?
I am a wind instrument, giless bow? Did you hi?
Hi?
Did you play any kind of instruments? Or maybe you still do?
No?
I did very much against my will. I was. I was forced to learn piano all through primary school, and then I was forced to play a win wind instrument right at high school. It was a tuba, which which was great because I was really really bad at it and it didn't matter when all you had to do was go boomp, bump boom.
Well, was your mum trying to make you a social outcast? Shout out to the tuba.
Players I know she didn't get a choice. It was the school. The school decided that's what I was going to be doing. I think it was down to the fact that they had a tuba and no one to play it.
And you had particularly big cheeks.
No, I think it was that I had to do an extracurricular activity and they put me down for that.
Come so sad that your tuber career didn't take off? Now we have not How good did you get on that? You couldn't You probably never got tips level on the piano.
No, no, no, I started appalling and ended appalling, and that's just fine by me. I Actually some of my kids have ended up being extremely talented musicians. But it's skipt A generator. And my father was too, but it's skipt are generation with me.
Do you do you think though that like maybe if you loved it like you hated it, right, so you're never going to be good at it because you're never going to be passionate about it.
Oh, adam being tone deaf, you know it. But you know, my family will listen to a great piece of music and they'll be, you know, in raptures about how good it is, and to me it all just sounds the same.
Really, that's so weird. There's not many people that you meet TIV that don't like music like they might like a different genre, but so you don't. Really you're not a fan of any band or any particular act or singer.
I know I like ac DC, but I think them and music probably aren't necessary barely spoken in the same sentence.
Come on, bro, don't be sacriligious. That is that is sure, there's a loose connection. Yeah, I saw I last saw them. I saw them the last time they played in Melbourne at the MCG just before what's his name, Brian Johnson. I was going to say Bond Scott, but Bond died about thirty years rip. Yeah, Brian Johnson pulled the pin because he's I think his voice is fucked. So I don't know that they're actually in existence anymore, but they gave it a good crack for about forty years, I reckon.
Yeah, and they have some real bangers. But they are bangers. There's you know, you don't have to not be toned off to enjoy them.
Well, they're no Tiff Cook, who's playing Vivaldi in Tchaikowski and Mozart and Brahms on a regular basis.
Yeah, yeah, well she's proving that whole ten thousand hour thing that Malcolm glad will popular I wanted to do something, Well, then you've got to put ten thousand hours into.
We've also spoken about the idea that you know somebody that like when you you know Tiger Woods or the william sisters, like they both started very very young and and they were you know, prodigies, and then they were world champions and all of these people, we think, what if they're or Roger Federer or any of these amazing world class famous people that what if they never picked up a tennis racket or a golf club, or what if they never were in the proximity of that thing,
that they became the best in the world at Like you one of those people that like maybe if Tiff started when she was three, she'd just be an internationally renowned painist at the moment.
Well, there's no reason she can't be anyway. I mean, I don't subscribe much to the ten thousand hour theory, and I don't think complad Well does now either. I think it became a lot bigger than he thought it would be. I think it's more a function of focus.
When you are focused to the level you would need to be to do the kind of hours that Tiff is putting into this, your brain is sort of in a hyperactive state where it's laying down connections and memories at a speed and frequency that you just can't do in everyday life. And so that if you can find something that you can do that with, you're going to get very very good at it, you know, whether you're counting up how many hours you do in it or not.
I always worry about science. That's you know, when we go, oh, how many hours ten thousand? Really yep? Not ten thousand and six, not N nine and forty two, Oh ten thousand, yep for everyone yep. Same yeah, expective of the skill, same ten thousand.
Well, you read things like Roger Federer's you know, I mean his life story. I don't know if you know, but he would have been good no matter what sport he did. Yeah, ultimately, And that's often the case when you read into the stories of our world class athletes, is they could have been world class in any one of five six seven different sports, and it just happens to be the one that we know them by now that they ended up in.
You know, and you know that people are phenomenal. Neither of you will tiff definitely one. I don't think you probably won't. But there was a guy in the I'm going to say eighties and nineties who played in the NFL and he also played in the NBL Major Baseball League. So you couldn't find two. Well, they're pretty different football and baseball. It's not like football and rugby or you know. So he played grin Dyane. He was a wide receiver.
His name is Dion Sanders, and he was also are also a batter in the Major Baseball League and it was like an all star in both. Like that's that's a talent. That's a prodigy.
Right, Well, both both things probably require pretty significant hand eye coordination and to be world class. You know, you're catching a ball moving at speed, traveling you know, sixty seventy yards downfield, and it's got to hit you on the chest, and you've got to hit a ball coming at you and you've got zero point three of a
second to judge where it's going to be. You need world class capabilities at hand eye coordination to be in that league and people who have those capabilities are going to find a sport or the sport's going to find them.
Yeah, I'm still looking. I mean, I don't I don't think I've peaked yet. I don't want anyone to make front of me. But I thought it was going to be podcasting, but it's not. What's going to say to you, I just quickly before we jump in, Malcolm glad Well that book he wrote blink right, that's right, Yes, that's right. That was an interesting book. Have you ever I think we spoke about that once, Tiff. Have you read that?
Yeah? Yeah, I read it. That's a good book.
That's a good book. That's that was that? You know? One of the stories that I think it's that book where there's this world renowned art critic, like famous, famous person, not so much critic but expert. And he went to maybe it was France, to see this painting, this very famous, famous painting that he'd never seen, and he was very excited and he walked into the room where it was on display to see it for the first time. And he walked in and he went, it's fake, straight up.
And he didn't even know how he knew. But they're like what do you mean, it's definitely not fake, And then they did all this testing and straight up he knew that it was and he was right. So it's just that when people instinctively know something without even knowing why they know it, You know that that intuitive kind of insight that is kind of inexplicable to the We all do it.
All the time, you know. It's what we call intuition. You know, there is such a thing as women's intuition. Women are better at it than men because they're more sensitive talsotocin, which is one of the key biochemical elements in the process. But we all perform really really tight sub second analysis. It's not even a blink, you know,
it's in the tens or hundreds of milliseconds. It's incredible science on it, and there's some really good studies, particularly funny we mentioned baseball before, but in the area of baseball where there's a lot of money for this sort of thing, really good studies on Because you've got about three hundred milliseconds between the plate and the bat for a fastball, and being able to judge where and how to hit that ball in that amount of time, you've either got it or you haven't, but there's been a
lot of work on understanding how we make those assessments that quickly.
And another athlete that comes to mind, also not Australian, Canadian, a Canadian or American, Wayne Gretzky. Was he a Canadian or American? Canadian?
Canadian ice hockey?
Right, yeah, yeah, ice hockey. And he had this phenomenal ability even before the ball had been sorry, the park had been struck. There's a rhyme to know where it was going to be and when. And he would always, like they said, apart from the fact that he could skate great, hit great, and here was a great athlete, but there was more to him than that, Like he had this level of awareness, spatial awareness and timing and
understanding and all this stuff that nobody had. So he was just you know, they still reckon the greatest of all time.
Yeah, I mean, you'll find that in common in most world class athletes. Their ability for three dimensional spatial analysis is better than the average brown bear. They can do stuff in less time than the rest of us can do.
So, based on our pre podcast conversation tip, if we were in the intuition room, you'd be the smartest.
There we can.
You'd be winning. You'd be winning.
Having more oxytocin than either of us.
Yeah, there's that, all right. The Unexpected Cure. This is David's new. If you don't follow David, what are you doing? Follow him? Follow him on sub stack, raisin Hell, subscribe to raisin Hell. It's all fread, it's all awesome. So he wrote. I'm not going to say he because you're right there. You wrote an article called the Unexpected Cure. How a nine h century explosive holds the key to
modern health. I love the byline or the subheading, from Explosives to erections A supply A surprising tale of of nitric oxide, the body's hidden messenger. Where where did the thought or idea or genesis for that particular topic come from. Surely you weren't sitting looking at your back garden and that came into your head. That must have come from an encounter or something.
It's it actually came out of stuff that I'd been writing on sugar a while ago. One of the pathways by which sugar does real damage to us is by producing significant increases in uric acid. And we can go into that another day if you want. But uric acid and degrades nitric oxide. And you might say, also, what, but nitric oxide was the molecule of the year in nineteen ninety two. Who knew they had such a thing?
And come on down, nit oxide, Thank you, thank you, thank I'd like to thank all the other molecules and.
The people who discovered what it does in the human body. Picked up the Nobel Prize in nineteen ninety eight for medicine. And it's a really interesting molecule because it's a gas that until then everyone thought its main property was being part of smog, because it's the bit of smog that makes it look yellow. But in the human body, it's used as a messenger. And the reason it's used as a messenger is because it transmits the message then disappears
because it reacts so quickly. So it's a perfect thing for the human body us as a messenger because the human body doesn't have to clean up after it, you know, it sends the message gone. Now the interesting when you read into okay, well how did we discover that? Who
discovered it? What were they trying to find? And you start to find well, how did they find that bit and how did they find that bit, and you just start going all the way back in time, and that ends up in the article I wrote there, which is that it sort of starts with nitroglycerin, which is, you know, the stuff that goes bang and explosive. It was discovered discovered in the eighteen forties in France, because you know, both people who are looking for a better explosive than gunpowder.
They found one. It was very very good, very very scarily good. And the chemistry found it said this is too good. I am I'm going to blow her hand off if I'm out. But someone else who was in the lab with him was a a fellow by the name of Alfred Nobel, and Alfred, Yes, the bloke who subsequently gave his name to the Nobel Prize, was an heir to an explosives fortune from Sweden. His family were big into making explosives, and he said, well, hang on, sick,
this is good stuff. Yes, it's a bit dangerous and it might blow you up, but there's got to be some potential here for this. And so he decamped from the lab where it was discovered by somebody else, taking a sample with him, went back to his family's explosives
factor and started mucking around. It took him a while, but by the eighteen sixties he managed to find substances that he could use to stabilize it, so he could sort of embed it in these substances, mix it together, and he patented something called dynamite and then subsequently jalig knite, and that created a massive fortune for him and his family.
Suddenly gunpowder was yesterday's news. You could use dynamite to blow mountains and bridges and dig tunnels and all this sort of stuff, and it was a license to print money. So Nobel ends up rescuing his family's fortunes, being forever wealthy, and in the end donating his fortune to the Nobel Prize, which is why we have a Nobel Prize. It was
created from the bloke he made dynamite. By the way, incidentally, at the end of his life he did have heart conditions that required treatment with the other use for nitroglycerin, which was producing nitric oxide. So this is a bit of a roundabout trip into this, but I found it
intensely interesting, particularly where they came from the idea. They first noticed that nitroglycerin might have a health benefit by observing the people in the nitroglycerin factory in Sweden who the blokes who had angina didn't have it when they are at work during the week but did have it on the weekends because they were they're handling all the nitroglycerine and inhaling it and their angina was fine, but on the weekends they had it. Now, at the time,
the treatment for angina was blood letting. It wasn't particularly effective. You know, they could actually drain blood from your body, figuring you know, blood pressure is the problem. So if we just have a little less blood flood in the body, that's right, thought of that. But anyway, so some people noticed this, Some scientists noticed this and said, hey, you know, there's a little bit like those poppers things that people
are using fer angina treatment. So there was these other things that were being used at the time called animal nitrate poppers, which were sold as little glass cylinders that you broke open and they popped and you inhaled them, and they temporarily cured angina at least took the symptoms away. Now poppers, by the way, are the same poppers that
still exist in nightclubs. You still you don't have things that you can break open, but it's still animal nitrate, which was because it has a hallucinatory effect as well. So anyway, slightly off topic there, some scientists said, hang on, these blokes inhaling nitroglycerin, let's look at that a little bit more carefully. So they did. They started doing studies on it. Found out this was much much better than using animal nitrate poppers, and you could just give people nitroglycerin,
so they did. It took a while to convinced doctors that this was a good idea, you know, the stuff used to blow up bridges and so on being given to patients to to you know, deal with their angina. But it was working. They didn't know why it worked, but it worked fast forward a long way. Yep, go ahead.
I was going to say, yeah, like, because I know that one drop of nitroglycerin, I think it can blow sh it up?
Right?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Who was figuring out the dose and how was it? What was the delivery mechanism?
It was sold so they put it with a stabilizing substance and sold it in little vials that you could just you could sniff, So it was it. Look, it wasn't dangerous. You weren't going to explode from the nitroglycerin they were selling medistantly. Interestingly, by the way, there was another invention in that factory where they were doing the nitroglytherin. They made them sit on one legged stools because they didn't want you're falling asleep while you're handling nitroglycerin or
you'd blow the whole place up. So they invented the one legged stool, which required a lot of balance in order to work there, and so you would stay awake, which other was a stroke of genius. Anyway, off topic a little bit. They so they didn't know why it worked, but then your worked. Fast forward a little bit later on to sort of more modern times when people are starting to look at well, why is this stuff working? What is it about it that's causing this to happen?
And this is where the blokes who eventually picked up the Nobel Prize for this started digging in. So in the nineteen nineties, three siders started looking at this wanted to understand what it was about nitroglycerine that was causing They found that it was releasing a gas, nitrogoxide that actually really relaxed the blood vessels and therefore loaded the blood pressure and brought about the effects that they saw
in treating angina. But better than that, they found that nitrog oxide actually gets used as a much more general purpose signa in the human body and is involved in any number of processes. So it's not just about it angina. It was involved in many chronic diseases. Now at that point, early nineteen nineties, nitchrik oxide is suddenly the wonder thing, you know, the fantastic thing. Every second day someone's publishing a journal article about it. Yet another thing that nitric
oxide cures or fixers in the human body. And even to this day, the amount of research being done on nitrog oxide is truly massive, because you can't turn a corner, you can't swing a dead cat without coming across another thing that nitrog oxide helps with. Now, Adviser decided to get on the bandwagon in the nineteen nineties and wanted to release a peal that they could sell to people to help with angina and heart disease and so on,
based on prolonging the effect of nitric oxide. Now, what they found in the trials that they were doing with this stuff is that it didn't really work for that but there was an interesting side effect, which is that the participants tended to end up getting erections, and they thought, well, this is an odd sort of thing to do, and so they started digging into the biochemistry of that and understood that what was in fact going on is that
nitric oxide promotes an erection and prolongs it. And so they thought, well, hang on, this is a much more interesting market with a lot more money to be made than yet another treatment for blood pressure or angina, and so viagra is yet another demonstration of the interesting ways that nitric oxide ends up helping in the human body.
The point is me and I just point out how responsible and restrained I've been for.
The last Yes, I know, I mean, Tiff had to mute you, but you know that's go on, all right. The interesting thing, and how this comes back to something that I would care about, is the effect that sugar has on nitroc oxide. So it turns out that if you really want to harm your ability to use nitric oxide in all of the thousands of ways that it's beneficial in the human body, all you've really got to
do is consume a large amount of sugar. And the studies on this are pretty significant, so that the more fructose you consume, so just crash course in sugar. Of course, we'll just go back to this table. Sugar sucrose, half glucose, half fructose. The fructose half of it is really rare in our evolutionary environment because we really only had access to it in fresh fruit and honey amounted to about two teaspoons worth of sugar per person per day to
about seventeen hundred. We still get about that amount to teaspoons per person per day from fresh fruit and honey, but we now also get about forty tea spoons per day from cane sugar, so we've massively increased the amount of fractose we're consuming. Fructose is converted to uric acid by the liver. Uric acid denahes and destroys the effect of nitric oxide, which has a cascade effect through everything
we do, so heart disease. Nitrog oxide keeps our blood vessels reacted and blood pressure and check if we impair nitric oxide production, we have constricted blood prestles, which is why you know more than half of everyone over fifties on blood pressure medication, because blood pressure is now the chronic disease of our age, and that's probably largely down to the fact that everyone's ingesting truly huge quantities of sugar.
So disabling nitrog oxide gives you heart disease, involved in the pathways for diabetes, it's involved in the pathways for kidney disease, it's involved in the pathways for ab city, and of course erectile this function just to name the big hits. So there's one little molecule. Nitric Oxide is involved in a lot of the things that stop us suffering significant chronic disease, and we are disabling it by consuming sugar and seed oils. But we can talk about
that another day if you're interested. Seed oils also have a disabling effect, but sugar is the big one. Now, if you're wondering, okay, well good, well, I'm not eating sugar, but how do I get more nitroc oxide? How do I prolong things? Do I have to mainline viagra?
No?
You don't, you want more nitioroxide? Eat garlic. Garlic is a superfood when it comes to nitric oxide. Other things like you know, the classic leafy greens, but in particular rocket letter excellent sources of nitric oxide. So if you've eliminated the sugar and the seed oil, and you're thinking, I still want even more nitric oxide. Then you make yourself up a pesto of garlic and rocket. I guess it'll get you there. So, and this is an important thing.
You can't have too much nitrog oxide. Your body's capacity to use it for good is virtually unlimited. And it's something that yes, you could start with the idea, well, I just want to at least be back down to normal operational capability, eliminate sugar and seed oils. But if you really want to take that extra step, then incorporate leafy greens. Garlic. Beetroot, interestingly is another good source, and
pomegranate another good source of it as well. So incorporate those things into your diet and you're amping it up even more.
I need to eat garlic. I love garlic, but garlic doesn't love me. Maybe I need to eat it raw, So that's not all.
I just do what I do, which is just take it as a tablet. Yeah, I mean, there are lots of good reasons to consume garlic that have nothing to do with nitrogo oxide. Although that's another good reason to take it you know.
What one do you take? Sorry to be rude, I haven't got.
It in front of me, so I can't remember the brand. It's just how many. I'm a milligram?
Okay, what do you take? And know everyone, this ain't this ain't for you, but this is just what David does. Ten thousand milligrams. So you have one of them a day.
Yeah, unless I feel a sickness coming on, like a cold or something, then I might amp it up and have two or three of them.
If you eat garlic, like as in eat it in your diet, yeah, I it a bit.
Yeah, I love garlic.
Yeah.
See, a lot of the benefits of the Mediterranean diet may well just be down to the fact that they put garlic in everything. It's anti viral properties are really significant, and and for that alone it's a good thing to be having on the regular. But adding its effect on nitrioxide as long as you've first of all deleted the sugar and the seed oils, and that's yet another reason to be taking garlic.
It's like we keep finding out more bad shit about sugar. I mean, we know that sugar is not bad, I mean not good, but sorry, we know it's No, I don't need any sugar. I don't even like sugar much. Rather, I like savory shit. I don't like sweet shit. But like, we just keep finding out more and more things that it destroys and fucks up.
Well, that's because we aren't evolved to deal with it. So fructose is a fairly rare thing in our involved environment. And whenever there's something that's rare in our involved environment that is now a significant part of our diet, we are likely to have serious problems with it. This is why seed oils are a problem. Amiga six was rare
in our evolved environment. We're getting maybe one and a half to three grams a day of it, But to be now getting twelve, fifteen, twenty grams a day of it that you're going to expect is going to cause problems because evolution didn't set us up for that.
Yeah yeah, yeah wow.
And so.
I guess for people with like and this is not a prescription either, but people with heart stuff, whacking a bit of extra garlic in the diet it's not going to hurt.
Is it? Well? I think in general, whacking a bit of extra garlic in the diet is not going to hurt. I mean, even if all you want to do is get rid of some warts. You know, one of the one of the viral infections that the garlic has been proven to remove warts.
Wow? Wow, like what like tuitaneous warts like the ones that kids get on adults as well? Wow, that's interesting. I mean, I'm excited to talk to you next or not next week, but next time, because you're talking about a topic that's close to our hearts, which is creat scene here at the U Project, because Tiff and I both consume it, and it's going to be some good news. But not all good news, am I right?
Yeah?
Well, not everything it's it's touted to do is panning out, but certainly some of the things it's touted to do are very effective.
MM. Tell people how they can find your articles again, mate, so they can follow.
So Facebook, all go to substract and check me out there. If you can't find me on substact, then find me on Facebook and you'll find articles posted there that linked to substact.
And if you can't find him there, find him on LinkedIn. Just go Glespo high hope Lesbo. Mate as always fascinating. We'll say goodbye fair but thank
You again, Absolute pleasure,